What Your Fantasy Woman Says About You

Have you ever wondered where your sexual fantasies come from and what they mean? Why, for instance, do certain types of people or bedroom acts really turn one man on but are completely off-putting to another? The answer may lie in the conflicts of your psyche as well as in your childhood experiences. Here, using a combination of research and psychological theory, we review four types of women that men commonly fantasize about and what each of these fantasy women says about you.

Fantasy woman: dominating

It might sound gross, but if you are the youngest child in your family and you have at least one older sister, you may be more likely to fantasize about a woman who, sexually speaking, likes to be in the driver’s seat. In real life, too, you would be drawn more toward a mate who is the oldest child in her family and has a younger brother, or is simply older than you age-wise.

Though this all sounds incredibly incestuous, you have nothing to fear; research has shown that women give 40% higher ratings in terms of how much they like a conversational partner if he is a last-born child (Ickes & Turner, 1983). Alternatively, if your parents have a relationship in which your mom wears the pants, you may also fantasize about dominant women because the woman-in-charge relationship was the one that was modeled to you as a child.

Fantasy woman: model or actress

An intense desire to be with an extremely beautiful woman for her exquisite looks rather than who she is may signal that you have narcissistic tendencies. If in real life you refuse to date women who are not drop-dead gorgeous, the possibility that you have a narcissistic bent to your personality goes up as this behavior suggests you may view your attractive female companions as trophies.

As a full-blown psychological problem, a recent study reported that 7.7% of men meet the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) at some point in their lives (Stinson et al., 2009), and it is estimated that up to 75% of people who suffer from this condition are men (Source: DSM-IV-TR).

Fantasy woman: alpha female

One interpretation of repeated fantasies about an alpha female is that you are engaging in projective identification. Not uncommon among couples, projective identification occurs when one person projects their own fantasies or desires onto another person and the other person, in turn, begins to behave in a way that conforms to these fantasies.

For example, if you grew up in a family where talking about money or appearing greedy in any way was a huge taboo, you may feel badly about wanting material things. By dating or fantasizing about a financially successful woman, however, you can have your cake and eat it too because you don’t have to own up to being a greedy person yourself. Projective identification may especially be at play in your fantasy life if you’ve noticed that in your real life you tend to fall for seemingly regular women only to find out that they turned into power-hungry animals at some point over the course of your relationship.

Fantasizing about a porn star? Find out what that says about you, next...